


Why I purged

by JoelleEmmily



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-17 14:42:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16976496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoelleEmmily/pseuds/JoelleEmmily
Summary: Imagine, if you will, making a video diary almost every day for years. You put into video record, your deepest thoughts, most impactful insights, most profound emotions... Each time you turn on the camera, an outburst of your inner-self flows into each second of those videos. And those videos, become your most valuable possessions, the process and the results and the actual physical recordings, becoming precious to you... a culmination, a validation, of everything that's ever happened in your life, a lead up to you becoming who you are.Now imagine, going back to those videos, playing them for yourself in a kind of retrospective... except... you don't recognize the person on the screen. You remember making the videos... you remember fretting and agonizing over how to exactly convey yourself... you even remember speaking most of the words... but the person on the screen, isn't you. And it's not that you just don't like how you looked back then... the person, is not you. Their face is rounder, they have a different hair and eye colour, they're a different ethnicity, their age is significantly different from yours... The person... is simply, and inarguably, not you.





	Why I purged

Imagine, if you will, making a video diary almost every day for years. You put into video record, your deepest thoughts, most impactful insights, most profound emotions... Each time you turn on the camera, an outburst of your inner-self flows into each second of those videos. And those videos, become your most valuable possessions, the process and the results and the actual physical recordings, becoming precious to you... a culmination, a validation, of everything that's ever happened in your life, a lead up to you becoming who you are.

Now imagine, going back to those videos, playing them for yourself in a kind of retrospective... except... you don't recognize the person on the screen. You remember making the videos... you remember fretting and agonizing over how to exactly convey yourself... you even remember speaking most of the words... but the person on the screen, isn't you. And it's not that you just don't like how you looked back then... the person, is not you. Their face is rounder, they have a different hair and eye colour, they're a different ethnicity, their age is significantly different from yours... The person... is simply, and inarguably, not you.

Several years ago, I exposed myself, and all my possessions, to black mould... and it turned my mind into mush. For those of you who live in Canada, or maybe anyplace with a health service, you'll understand the profundity of what I'm about to say next. My doctor administered a memory and cognition test, and I failed it so spectacularly, that I was given an appointment for an MRI for 10 days later. Then someone was put into the machine who had some metal in their body, and it broke. It took about 2 to 3 weeks for the MRI to be fixed, but despite there now being a backlog of 3 weeks worth of patients on top of the week or so I was still waiting, I was still given an appointment within the first 2 weeks of its repair.

There was concern that I might have brain damage from carbon monoxide poisoning... I was scared out of my mind that I might have early onset Alzheimer's... But the scan found almost nothing, just some very minor regions of some measurable, but minor, vascular deterioration... which is probably genetic because my mother had the same results when she was given an MRI do to an injury. They just could not find an explanation for my memory and executive deterioration.

But my doctor continued to be concerned, he knew me, had been my doctor for over 10 years, and he saw the personality changes, my inability to convey my thoughts, my tripping over my words, my forgetting what I was saying in the middle of saying it... and he saw my inability to function. At the time, I was sleeping for over half the day, sometimes for several days in a row... I wasn't really playing video games, I love video games BTW, and I wasn't really eating... But throughout it all, I continue to tried to write.

Then, because of a really stupid event that I won't relate to you because I turn out very badly in it... because of how literally stupid I was acting... I found the mould... in my air-conditioners... hiding away like a microscopic trojan army... secretly grunt rushing up my nose and into my brain... rendering me, an almost complete moron.

"But wait," I say in the most Ronco voice ever, "there's more!" During my period of idiocy, I became addicted to youtube, mostly top 10 videos and other useless clickbaity things, but also, to news clips. You know, Americans have a very interesting president... not interesting like the discovery of oumuamua, or a star system that might be, MIGHT BE, undergoing a highly accelerated deployment of a Dyson-esk solar energy collector swarm, but interesting like a fly being slowly smothered to death by an oozing flow of amber. And while watching this more entertaining than real TV reality show unfold, I found myself being emotionally swept up in it, and seriously thinking something terrible and profound might happen... But nothing ever comes from these things. In reality, the current US president hasn't, and isn't, trying anything other presidents have done, and truthfully, almost nothing, in the US, and the world over, has changed. Yes, some opinions have been altered, lines have been drawn, friends turned into adversaries, horrible policies enacted, crimes committed... a reporter butchered... But really, it's just another day on planet earth, and if alien anthropologists are watching us, this period might be an exciting development, but probably only amounts to a 5 minute segment in the documentary they'll release back home... Most likely titled, "Naked Ape-men, humanity's parasitic takeover of a blue/green world."

Meanwhile, in a brain so fogged, it forgets which skull it's in, I formed a co-dependent friendship with a guy who we'll call Chris... And Christopher, if you're reading this, don't even think about contemplating that I'm not referring to you... Colonel Emma McDamia of the US Army Department of Transhuman Development and Defence... I don't hate you, I don't even blame you, and I don't think you did anything intentionally... but you're a dick, and I will never trust you again. Ever. Find a therapist before you get too old to truly turn your life around.

Anyways, co-dependent friendship... Chris is a narcissist, perhaps even bordering on sociopath, and he fed on me, which shouldn't be surprising as my mother and father are also narcissists, and they made me into an enabler. And by the way, an enabler is probably one of the worst organisms on the planet, they make excuses, apologize, mindlessly forgive, and encourage the person they enable into greater and greater feats of abhorrent behaviour. I made Chris worse, because I rewarded his feeding off of me, and I probably made it a whole lot more difficult for the next person he moves on to.

Chris, don't be stupid and try to respond to this post, no one knows it's you, just bad mouth me to your other friends.

Anyways number two... During my fog-ification, I let him into my writing, allowed him to influence my characters and settings, and allowed him to encourage my self-doubt and anxiety. I thought he was a far more imaginative artist than I was, I thought he was far more intelligent than I was at the time... but I was admiring google. Literally. Every debate, every discussion, every analysis of a trope or literary device, it was me and my dumbening, floundering against search results from the great god google. I'm old-school, I was born before the internet and every day cell phones, and while I do understand the technology, I don't truly understand its sociological implications. One really can fake being anything with the power of google and a smart phone... I actually believed he knew a lot about quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence... but it was just google... THAT'S CRAZY! I even believe he was a better gamer than I am... I acknowledge that I'm not even good, but I'm not bad... HE WAS TERRIBLE!

I made him into an authority in my life, gave him power in my creativity, relied on him, and even considered making him a co-author. Created a world for his character to inhabit, pushed him to flush it out, developed my own for that world, I really thought we could help each other become better writers... I was hopeful we could...

Then, the spell that'd turned me into a newt, was power washed down the drain, and I got better, and everything fell apart. I figured out he really wasn't that good of a writer, he had potential, and some talent, unless he's faked that as well, which is possible, but really had no direction or vision. I found out that he'd lied about every aspect of himself... He even lied about the possibility of having hypogeusia/ageusia, and carried it on for months, just because I was on his case about his propensity for eating cereal all the time instead of making himself healthier meals... He even played the part while I tried to explain to him how certain tastes... tasted. I went into enormous effort to try and pull him into an aspect of life I thought he might be missing. He eventually admitted to lying about it, and did so for no discernible reason. It wasn't until later that I learned that that is a common tactic with narcissists, they intentionally reveal themselves to evoke reactions from their targets.

Then, I reread my stories... in the original thought experiment at the beginning, I re-watched the video diary I'd created... and I saw very little of myself in them. My imagery had become childishly simplistic, I'd become overly reliant on dialogue... and I just really had no direction.

Claude Monet, I think, it may have been another artist, over the course of his life, suffered from progressively worsening cataracts, which effected his work. Slowly, over time, his paintings became progressively more red and somewhat distorted. At one point, he had surgery performed to remove a cataract from one of his eyes (only one, because at the time it was a risky procedure and they did one at a time to prevent total vision loss), opening both to how his perception of the world... had been false. He went about painting an "identical" landscape, first with the eye still afflicted with a cataract; then the other which had been operated on. The difference had apparently been a profound shock to him, and he preceded to destroy some of his work.

I can't claim to know what, precisely, Monet was thinking, but to me, I think he looked upon the worlds he'd created, and saw how negatively influenced they had been, how distorted reality had been through his eyes, and how wrong it all looked, and felt... Maybe that sentiment is projection, truthfully, I'm not exactly sure if the artist I'm thinking of was Monet... but it was... is, how I feel. My work had been twisted and distorted by a mental impairment so severe, I was given tens of thousands of dollars in free emergency medical assessments, and a person I trusted with something I held precious, my writing, turned out to be a galactic level poser. I just could not allow my stories to continue to exist.

At one point, during my weaker moments, prior to cutting all ties with Chris, I lamented to him at how disappointed I was in my work, and that I was thinking of wiping them off the face of the planet. He didn't discouraged me from doing so... he only said that he wanted to archive them before I did so. Maybe he thought/thinks, he's had some integral part in their creation... he did practically refuse to read anything I'd written before I became ill, before he'd entered my life... maybe he thinks he's their inspiration, their father, so to speak... You're not Chris, you're the abusive babysitter who turned them neurotic. Yes, I'm a little bit bitter...

Anyways number three... really, REALLY should stop using anyway as a segue. Chris, my addiction to youtube news clips, and his encouragement of my incidental addiction to the antics of the US head of state, has had a secondary effect on my behaviour, but one that likely has had a far more profound effect on me, and my writing. At some point during this slay ride through ash, I'd stopped reading.

Writers who don't read, are stagnant, and trapped in their own heads. Movies, TV shows, plays, whatever, they can give a writer inspiration, but nothing compels a writer like reading somebody else's work. If the piece is bad, one might want to do something better... if a piece is good, it might inspire you to something similar... and if a story is great... it will urge you to better yourself. Nothing is more delicious, more satisfying, and more makes one want to be a writer, than the fantastic buffet of a well crafted story.

None of what I've written has been intended as a justification... it's an apology. I'm sorry. To every reader I've ever had, any reader I might still have left, any fan who's taken an interest in my work, I'm truly, and utterly sorry. I'm sorry for not giving you my best, I'm sorry for taking down anything you may have enjoyed... and I'm sorry for not appreciating you more. You readers are the most important aspects of my life. I, as a writer, cannot exist without you. And I hope I can earn your readership back one day.

Yesterday's The Future, Tomorrow's The Past, will be retooled and rewritten, slightly... many aspects will be similar, but the time they're thrown back to, will be different. Unfortunately, Princess Elizabeth won't be able to be a crew member. The Voyager Flotilla will also return, but with much less retooling... still a lot of rewriting though. Shepard's Glissando and Don't Let It Bring You Down will get some minor rewrites to their first few chapters with very little changes, but the later chapters, especially with Don't Let It Bring You Down, will be heavily edited if not completely thrown out.

On a less positive note, Reliance... will not return. Reliance was written as an outburst to the lack of interest in Shepard's Glissando. When I wrote it, I tried my absolute hardest to make it as bad as possible without it seeming blatantly so, and I intentionally baited commenters... It was a horrible thing for me to do, and I wish I could say the black mould poisoning had something to do with it... but it didn't, chapter 2 and beyond were written before I'd become impaired... and the fact that chapter 1 had gotten far more attention than Glissando, drove me to prove a point... a very stupid point. Some of its concepts might be folded into another story I'm considering, Reciprocity.

I'm still recovering, psychologically as well as physically, I've lost a lot of muscle mass over the years of inactivity, and psychologically... I feel very... out of sorts... not in a," I don't know what's happening", sort of way, but in a, "I don't know how to fix this," sort of way, so re-posts will likely be slow.

I'm not sure how many will read this, or care, but if you do either, thank you. As always, thank you for reading.


End file.
